


love feels like loneliness sometimes

by lightningstars



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Boarding School, Angst, F/M, Multi, Pain, War, a wholleee lotta angst babe so get ready, also plot?? hello?? plot bby?? you there?? guess not, and lISTEN thats canon and i love it sm, anyways aos is back tonight which means i see robbie tonight im glad i love my kid, anyways i know that robbie is very somber now but before the accident he was so happy and giddy, i guess, im gonna cry this is just hella weird prose smushed together into something dumb, vague mentions of coulson & may but only like. name dropping nothing serios
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-10
Updated: 2017-01-10
Packaged: 2018-09-16 15:02:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9277220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightningstars/pseuds/lightningstars
Summary: And at the end of the day his heart still thrusts wildly in it’s cage for her. At the end of the day roses are red, violets are blue and she loves him.+The worst part is that sometimes it feels dangerously normal. It doesn’t feel as if they are in any danger, they’re just kids who put their feet on each other’s laps and copy homework answers from one another.Elena calls him Reyes, Mack calls him Robbie and Daisy calls him ‘Rob’ or ‘Rob-o’ or any variation of it just to spite him. He flips her off at the breakfast table and she laughs, head back, hair flowing and winks in his direction. At night in the common room she steals his English homework and then proceeds to read out loud every sentence and pick it apart. She rewrites it and is halfway back to her bed when he yells out ‘I CAN’T SUBMIT AN ESSAY ON THE ORIGIN OF ROBERT AND IT’S NICKNAMES DAIS’ and she yells back ‘OF COURSE YOU FUCKING CAN. I WROTE IT AND THUS YOU KNOW COULSON WILL GIVE IT AN A’. It’s so normal when she steals all of his socks when getting ready for classes and he flicks her temple when walking by her.alsoknown as that au where i fuck shit up.





	

**Author's Note:**

> uhhhh i love you a lot and thanks for reading this. pls kudos and comment it fuels my exitance

And at the end of the day his heart still thrusts wildly in it’s cage for her. At the end of the day roses are red, violets are blue and she loves him.

+

The worst part is that sometimes it feels dangerously normal. It doesn’t feel as if they are in any danger, they’re just kids who put their feet on each other’s laps and copy homework answers from one another.

Elena calls him Reyes, Mack calls him Robbie and Daisy calls him ‘Rob’ or ‘Rob-o’ or any variation of it just to spite him. He flips her off at the breakfast table and she laughs, head back, hair flowing and winks in his direction. At night in the common room she steals his English homework and then proceeds to read out loud every sentence and pick it apart. She rewrites it and is halfway back to her bed when he yells out ‘I CAN’T SUBMIT AN ESSAY ON THE ORIGIN OF ROBERT AND IT’S NICKNAMES DAIS’ and she yells back ‘OF COURSE YOU FUCKING CAN. I WROTE IT AND THUS YOU KNOW COULSON WILL GIVE IT AN A’. It’s so normal when she steals all of his socks when getting ready for classes and he flicks her temple when walking by her.

He wakes up every morning and calls his brother in a routine-like fashion. They talk for half an hour before Gabe goes to school and Robbie hangs up and thanks God that he’s still okay. There is never any in between in his life, it’s either calm and peace or complete and utter panic. It’s either a serene quiet or crushing fear. When he forgets that he has History class for first period on Thursday he hurriedly runs to his class to find it deathly silent. Professor May is crying behind her teacher’s desk because she was talking to her father just last night, he was complaining about the weather and she had just gotten the phone call five minutes ago that he died. Sometimes in between his own world it slips his mind that the world is in a state of chaos and that’s maybe the most tragic part of it.

After class Daisy grabs his hand and drags him behind the school to show him the art she’s been working on. She’s intoxicating, all brown hair and bright eyes. She swears that she’s going to make it out, she’s going to meet the world and love it. He wants to tell her that it’ll love her back because she’s Daisy Johnson and nothing could hate her. In his dreams he’s Icarus and she’s the sun, melting his wings. He’s falling but he can watch her thrive and to him that’s enough.

She can feel a garden growing underneath her skin, flowers in her veins the stems running through her blood. She can feel herself rooting towards him everyday, growing closer towards him as the seconds go on. She tells him that she wants to sleep on Jupiter and he laughs and tells her that he’ll visit her. She tells him that her favorite color is green, the green that can only be found in the rainforest and he promises her that he’ll fly there someday and steal all the green for her.

At breakfast Robbie tells Elena that he likes oranges more than apples so she starts a food fight. She pours a carton of milk over his head and he flings pudding into her hair. Daisy’s laughing so hard she falls off the table and wants to live in the moment forever. When they both get detention Robbie smirks at her. She throws an apple at him and he falls down. As they drag him to the nurse he keeps complaining about ‘purposeful harm to my body’ and Mack threatens to drop him on the stairs if he doesn’t shut up. Elena accidentally does drop him and he refuses to talk to her for two days. When he’s finally able to walk around he finds Elena hanging upside down from his bed poster and a hundred apples lying on his bed.

At night the stars glitter and he takes her to the top of the school. It’s well after hours and they’re both going to get in too much trouble if they get caught but he looks at her with a gleam in his eyes she hasn’t seen for a while and her heart turns to water. She nearly breaks her ankle climbing window sills.

When they get to the top there’s enough alcohol up there to keep them company for years. She glances at him and he shrugs, telling her that he may sometimes sneak up the roof all the time when he wanted to get away. She grabs a vodka and lays on the hard roof staring at the sky. He tells her all the constellation names and the stories behind them. She listens to his voice, it’s the most soothing thing she’s ever heard. She once told him he could talk Satan out of punishment and he had looked at her strangely, as if she was a puzzle he needed to solve.

He stops talking after a while and she misses it. She wasn’t even processing everything he had been saying but when she hears his voice it’s a calming effect. She turns her head to him and he’s grown quiet like he does when he’s thinking. After a minute he says that he’s scared. She shifts towards him and tells him that it’s okay and that nothing is going to get to them. That she wouldn’t let anything hurt him and would battle God themself if it meant protecting him.

Robbie nods and when sleep consumes him that night he dreams of the man killing him. He dreams of blood flowing out and of faces contorting into hideous images he didn’t think existed in any world. _This is war_ he realizes when he wakes up sweat dripping down him. _This is war_ he considers when he looks over and see’s Mack’s empty bed and a beer peeking from underneath the bed. He tries to go back to sleep but wakes up after a blood shrieking scream coming from the girls dorms. _This is war_ he thinks when it dawns upon him that the scream was Elena’s. In the morning Elena grins at him across the breakfast table and he pretends everything is okay.

In English class Coulson goes on about Shakespeare and Daisy doodles her name into the desk. She wonders how her parents are doing; she barely remembers them at this point now. If she closes her eyes and tries really hard to remember she can feel the disappointment in her mother’s eyes and the growls in her father’s voice. She doesn’t need to close her eyes to remember the slaps across her face and the words hissed in her ear.

When class is done she feels Robbie looping his arm around her as they leave. When they first met he kept to himself, he didn’t even so much as go a foot near her. As time went on there was more touches to the point where he freely grabbed her and spun her around bridal style when she had a bad episode. She leans her head on his shoulder as they walk outside into the light and she tells him about Coulson’s class. He kisses her temple when he leaves and she wonders how war can exist in a world that also has Robbie.

Evil spreads rapidly like the plague did. People buy into it’s hate and she forcefully blocks out the negative from her mind. Matthews Carter calls her a filthy human and Mack punches him in the gut. She steps over his body and ignores the whispers around them as she pulls him into a side hug as they walk away. When the principal calls her down to his office Mack looks at him directly in his eyes and tells him that he did the right thing. He doesn’t get detention.

She steals Elena’s science homework three and a half minutes before class starts. Robbie scoffs at her but copies over her shoulder because he completely forgot they had any work. Mack lends Robbie his copy of The Odyssey and he spills salsa all over it. Elena calls him a bastard with good hair and Robbie smirks. Daisy steals a carton of Double Decker ice cream from the kitchen and they eat it instead of studying for their tests. Elena answers questions wrong in class and Mack pulls all nighters to write his history essay. Everything is so fucking normal but it isn’t. Because Robbie is smart and knows that the world is just trying to lure him into a sense of false hope before the universe rips the rug from under him. He hates himself for wanting to lay down on the rug and hide in it.

Daisy dreams of walking in a museum with nothing in it. The halls smell of blood and false hope. She turns the corner and there they are, corpses lining the floor perfectly. There’s half a smirk on their faces, a gleam in their eyes. They died fighting and she throws up the second she wakes up. She sneaks into Robbie’s bed that night and he holds her tight. He wants to hold her tight enough to stitch her broken ribs together. He can’t.

It gets to the point where she knows he’s in the room without looking. It’s as if her heart is a compass that’s always pointing towards him. Her pulse reaches out and jumps towards him and tumbles into him in a rush of feelings. She feels herself turning into nothing and everything. Her mind turns into that of an eight-year old who wants the world. Daisy wants him in every possible way, in that dirty grimey way under her skin. She finds herself wanting him desperately and urgently like a primal animal. He has her heart and doesn’t even know it.

(That’s too poetic for them, she tells herself at night)

(They are poetry the gods tell each other with smiles)

In class she’s the only thing he can focus on. She’s too present, bones jutting out of her as if they want to leap out and capture him. He wants to live in her ribcage, sleep to the sound of her beating heart and see everything from her perspective. He wants to kiss her dizzy and hold her when she’s shaking until she stops and the world pauses. He could find her anywhere, even three-hundred thousand miles away in the middle of a rainstorm in the Sahara desert. He can find her anywhere and seeing her so much as breath kills him on the inside. He wonders when exactly he felt so much for one person.

She refuses to eat pears with their skin on. He tells her that it’s unnatural to eat naked pears and the next day there is spray paint that reads ‘naked pears are fuckin awesome’ on the back of the school. She gets detention because she dropped her phone at night and although he would never admit it he gets himself in trouble to scrub the bathroom floors with her. She throws paper towels at him and he scrunches up his nose.

Mack and Elena start a study group because finals are coming up and Daisy runs towards him breathless. She slaps down twenty dollars in front of him and bets him a week before they start hooking up. He glances across the table and watches them laughing together foreheads touching and marvels at when he missed that particular development. He shakes himself out of his thoughts and puts out a forty dollar bill that it’ll take them less than seven days and she grins, pearl white teeth and all. 

When he catches them fucking in the bathroom stalls three days later he sticks his tongue out at Daisy every time he sees her for a week. She refuses to talk to him until he gives her a slice of cake and she flicks him in the ear. Everything is mundane and he wants to live in the calm forever. 

(But he gets a call two days later. He flies out back to his home to find it in a hollowed out version of what he called his home. His neighbors have dropped of gifts and there’s a funeral for his brother. Nothing feels real and mundane anymore. He doesn’t cry.)

Elena shoves a box of cookies in his hands the minute he returns back to school. He stares at them numbly and he can distinctly hear himself thanking her before going inside. He avoids everyone’s gazes and whispers and when he falls down on his bed he curls underneath the blanket and doesn’t move. He doesn’t know if he can.

She peeks into the room in the morning. He didn’t go to see her, the last time she saw him was when he was a frenzy in his room, packing essentials and keeping himself busy so he wouldn’t cry. She gave him a kiss on the cheek and watched him leave the school and her heart ran with him. Daisy considers going into the room with him, slide underneath the sheets and hold him until he stops trembling. But she hears a choked up sob emitting from his body and she doesn’t think she could take hearing it up close. She goes to all hs classes and collects his homework. She doesn’t write his English paper on the origin of Robert and it’s nicknames.

Mack drops down next to her in the morning. He gives her a look and mentions that Robbie still couldn’t get out of bed. Daisy bites the inside of her lip before getting up in a sigh. She wanders over to the boys dormitory room to find him sitting up straight. His eyes are bloodshot and tired. She sits next to him not sure what to say exactly.

After a beat Robbie tells her that he missed her. She smiles and tells Robbie she missed him too. (She doesn’t say ‘I love you’) He asks her what he’s missed around the school, if anything new happened. She sits next to him and tells him how Mack can’t stop looking at Elena like she’s the goddamn sun (‘pft like he didn’t do that before?’) and tells him that she thinks Coulson and May are finally dating. She tells him that she thinks Jemma Simmons, the brunette in their science class is bi and that she thinks elephants are the best animals in the world. Daisy’s fairly certain that he has stopped listening but she isn’t sure how else to help him.

Robbie leans his head on her shoulder and she becomes quiet. He tells her that a lot of people came to the funeral, people offered their condolences or gifts. Some stood and shared stories and kept looking at him like he was fragile and was going to break. She asks him if he is. He swallows thickly and closes his eyes. In a voice that would barely be considered a whisper he says that he’s been breaking for a while. She closes her eyes in order to hold herself steady and breathes in sharply when she feels his tear on her arm.

He goes to class the next day. He hides from nearly everyone, Mack seems to understand that he needs time and Elena gives him a smile before leaving him. In class he hears the lesson without listening and feels himself floating in and out of his body. _War is too much_ he thinks and it’s a dull ache. He always knew that war was happening, that people died but his brother was too good. Gabe was kind, young, healthy. He shouldn’t have died, his death is too much for Robbie to handle. He can’t do it, he can’t keep living when his own brother is gone and he’s about to leave when he distinctly hears Daisy’s voice cutting through his panic.

Robbie stumbles into her and she wraps her arms around him. He can vaguely feel the sea of students navigating around them but he can’t find it in himself to care. She’s a rock in the middle of the ocean, she’s like a pole in the middle of a rainstorm, she’s holding him steady and balanced and he couldn’t ask her for anything more.

She isn’t sure how long they’re there for, maybe days or weeks. Logically she knows they can’t be but time has stopped working in her world. She thinks that the whole universe would stop working for Robbie. When he’s able to move again she gently drags him to an empty classroom where he falls asleep on a desk. Daisy sits with him well after he’s asleep in case he wakes up and doesn’t know where he is. She pushes down the voice in her asking why she’s so bothered if he wakes up scared.

He doesn’t get better. Daisy knows he isn’t going to right away but she wants him to. More than anything she wants to see him smile or smirk in that Reyes way only he does and flip her off when she bothers him. But it’s like all the light’s been sucked out of him, as if there’s only a hole where his heart used to sit and pitch blackness fills his ribcage, his shoulder blade, his finger nails. But then- then he laughs and it’s not the same one he used to have. It’s more of a cough but she sees a hint of a smile appear on his face and thinks maybe he’s getting better.

He isn’t the same guy he was. Robbie realizes this in the middle of May’s class and it’s as if something's been put in place for him. He has spent so much time trying to be the guy from before but he can’t. There’s a before Robbie and an After Robbie and he needs to figure out who After Robbie is. (After Robbie still notices Daisy before anything else)

After Robbie still kinda laughs at Daisy’s pathetic puns and thinks Mack’s cookies are the best in the world. He hugs Elena a bit tighter and paints his nails more. After Robbie is a mess and misses his brother more than he thought humanly possible but After Robbie talks about Gabe when he misses him. After Robbie is trying and he thinks that counts for something.

Elena spreads her legs across his lap when they’re pretending to do homework. She throws peanuts at him and asks the difference between repression and suppression. He throws a dictionary in her direction that she catches effortlessly. She grabs a sharpie and starts marking up every page with little notes or pictures. On the page with the definition of ‘dick’ she drew a hundred small dicks across the page, giggling so hard she fell off the couch. Robbie rolls her eyes but he’s openly grinning now too and they’re both laughing at the name Richard.

The year goes on. Finals happen in a blur and then there’s graduation. Sometime in between Daisy watches Robbie heal a little bit. He eats ice cream still and he isn’t the same kid she knew before the accident but he’s still her Robbie. She’s still a sunflower, twisting and turning to be in his light. She’s still Eve and he’s the apple, something tempting and lovely she ruins with a single touch. Or maybe she’s the Earth rotating in every direction, running after the sun in hopes of loving it. Maybe she’s just a girl who’s fallen in love with a boy somewhere along the way and doesn’t know what to do with herself.

Robbie comes up to her and tells her with a glint in his eyes that he’s going to fight. The second he gets out of the school he’s going to fight with every tooth and nail. He says it as if Daisy didn’t already know and was planning on joining him. Even if she wasn’t she could never stop him. He’s Robbie, he’s good and would do what’s right in any world. She wonders how someone as filthy as her can love someone as golden as him and wants to cry because out of all the things the universe could have thrown at her, kindness was not supposed to be one of them. 

They get out of the school and are thrown out in the world. The four of them get recruited at S.H.I.E.L.D., a place where they can do some good. Nothing changes in his world, there are still people dying and there is fear everywhere he turns. But if he looks up the sun is hitting Daisy’s hair and her eyes are shining brightly and he knows he would die before letting anything ruin that. He would ruin the world for her, he’d let nature destroy itself for her.

Robbie’s already dead and he knows that. He’s going to be broadcasted on the news in a bigger number and he won’t know how this war ends. His death is inevitable and the thought of it is terrifying but he imagines what could happen to her and everything feels worth it. He’d swallow sand then spit it back into the ocean a thousand times if it made her happy. 

When he’s hit he falls and its ungraceful because his life isn’t a movie and this isn’t scripted. He sends a prayer to anyone out there to protect his Daisy. The numbness around him deepens and he can vaguely hear someone saying his name. _This is war_ he understands, _people fighting for their beliefs. People dying for each other_

**Author's Note:**

> [cant get enough of fucked up prose? want more quakerider related tears? want to yell at me? heres my tumblr](http://www.isabellarosaline.tumblr.com)
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> kudos and comments are greatly appreciated babe


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